A Woman's Friendship

A Woman's Friendship, one of the author's many newspaper novels, was serialised in the Age in 1889. It is now, for the first time, available in book form. Elizabeth Morrison's edition for the Colonial Texts Series is a careful rendering of the newspaper text, with an extended introduction and notes and, as an appendix, 'The Reform Club', a short story version written by Cambridge thirty-one years later. In this gentle satire of clase and sexuality, Ada Cambridge opens a window on Melbourne society of the 1880s and illuminates some important issues of the day - reform of dress and diet, the 'marriage question', socialism, and women's suffrage. The Grand Melbourne Exhibition of 1888 is a most agreeable place for Margaret Clive, a journalist's wife, and Patty Kinnaird, married to a squatter, to pursue their 'purely intellectual friendship' with handsome, widowed and wealthy Seaton Macdonald. The triangular relationship changes, however, when the women are house guests at Yarrock, MacDonalds magnificent country property - and unadmitted attractions begin to surface.